Employ The Strategy of the Lotus Sutra

“A great human revolution in just a single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a nation, and further, can even enable a change in the destiny of all humankind.” With this as his main theme, Daisaku Ikeda wrote his twelve-volume account of Josei Toda’s life and the phenomenal growth of the Soka Gakkai in postwar Japan. This work paints a fascinating and empowering story of the far-reaching effects of one person’s inner determination. Josei Toda’s awakening and transformation, his efforts to teach others the unlimited power of faith, his dedication in leading thousands out of misery and poverty, the efforts of his devoted disciple Shin’ichi Yamamoto—within these stories we find the keys for building lives of genuine happiness. (Please return here each Monday for a new passage.)

Excerpts from Volume 10, Determination Chapter, pp. 1310-1311

Each of the three candidates running in the national election could expect support from about one hundred thousand households. As for the Tokyo metropolitan electorate, there were considerably more than ninety thousand households that belonged to the Soka Gakkai. Furthermore, the organization in the capital boasted an array of veteran leaders with many years of faith behind them. The candidate in the Osaka prefectural constituency was the only one who found himself in so terrible a position.

The campaign seemed doomed even before it got started. All of the thirty thousand local Gakkai households were still quite new in faith. The fostering and training of what few leaders there were had only just begun.

Josei Toda assessed the situation in Kansai for exactly what it was: almost hopeless. With full knowledge of this he dared to entrust Shin’ichi with the campaign in that area. It appeared that he must be planning some surprise operation. If the spot Shin’ichi held in Toda’s heart had not grown larger and larger as the months and years passed, Toda would not even have considered him.

More than anything Toda wanted Shin’ichi to command the campaign. Victory or defeat was secondary to him. He must put his disciple through the arduous task of opening a new path toward kosen-rufu in the future.

Shin’ichi was the apple of his eye, and he knew that he himself could not expect to live many more years. He must see Shin’ichi fight gallantly and display all his potential as a Bodhisattva of the Earth. Only then could Toda be sure that the organization would remain steadfast even after his death. He had already made up his mind to place total responsibility for ensuring the ongoing flow of the Soka Gakkai’s movement for kosen-rufu in the hands of this twenty-eight-year-old youth.

For the past nine years, Shin’ichi Yamamoto had never once protested against Toda’s requests, whether they were explicit or implicit. Even in the midst of the terrible struggles and hardships he shared with Toda during 1950 and 1951, he had continued to answer his mentor’s expectations with his whole life. Toda made any number of seemingly impossible demands. But each time Shin’ichi would put himself in the vanguard, remove the obstacles and open the way.

When Shin’ichi heard what Toda expected of him in the forthcoming Kansai campaign, he responded to his teacher’s call without a moment’s hesitation. However, even at that moment he was all too painfully aware of the wide gap that lay between reality and the goal.

At first Shin’ichi sank into despair. Although he told no one, he was in constant torment, day in and day out, with the baffling problem of how to unfold the campaign. In the midst of his painful search for a solution he was about to scream out in agony, when one after another, like rising clouds, passages of the Gosho appeared in his mind. These passages sharply pointed out to him how to turn the impossible into the possible.

They told him that the key to victory did not necessarily lie in numerical strength but in the indestructible unity of even a few people and clearly revealed that the power of faith was unlimited. After all, wasn’t he a believer of Nichiren Daishonin’s Buddhism in the Latter Day? If the Daishonin’s teachings were true, then there was no way that he could fail to prove them. Did not the Gosho state, “Employ the strategy of the Lotus Sutra before any other” (wnd, 1001)? Shin’ichi now thoroughly realized that the only thing he could count on were the Gohonzon and the Gosho.